Sumitomo Corporation (Shanghai) visits Asian Metal

On the afternoon of September 12th, Takagi Yasunobu (the section chief) and Shi Junjie from non-ferrous metal raw material department of Sumitomo Corporation (Shanghai) Limited, visited Asian Metal and exchanged views with cobalt & lithium market analyst Carol Lin on cobalt market.

Carol introduced the current cobalt supply at home and abroad and other information that Chambishi had planned to supply 3,000t cobalt metal in 2017, but the supply in H2 of 2017 may decrease due to raw ore supply and cobalt prices remain at high level on the international market.

The Chinese cobalt salt market started to see decreasing output from certain producers from August due to environmental issues and the output may gradually get recovered in late September. Currently, downstream NCM material producers consecutively release capacity and Asian Metal expected for a continuously but slower increase for cobalt salt prices compared with H1 despite the slow increase in short time in the Chinese market.

Sumitomo maintained cobalt metal (cobalt beans) supply was 3,600t in 2016, which is expected to reach 4,000t in 2017. However, as cobalt metal prices are in disparities in China, the company exports no material to China temporarily.